Thursday, August 26, 2010

Three years ago, Julia picked up a book on someone's doorstep as she was trick-or-treating on Halloween night. She showed me the book, All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor, and the BookCrossing.com sticker that someone had pasted on it. I had good intentions of checking out this site but never got around to it. The book ended up somewhere in the black hole that we call Julia's room.

When summer break began, Julia decided to do a major clean-up of her room, and this book ended up on top of one of the many piles scattered throughout the hallway. Kate spotted it and insisted we look it up on the BookCrossing site. Well, I did just that and ended up joining as a member. I even shamefacedly admitted in my journal entry that we'd kept the book buried away for all those years. In the week that followed, Kate and I both read the book, a classic children's story about a Jewish family growing up in New York. Then we released it by passing it onto my sister-in-law Jill. It's now in Singapore, after some brief stops in Western Canada.

Since then, I've had loads of fun releasing books "in the wild". I've never liked hoarding books and I've regularly culled my shelves and given books away to friends, family members and charity shops. However, it's much more exciting leaving them in coffee shops, food courts, highway rest stops and other places, where anyone might find them. I've had two catches so far out of a dozen books released. That's not too bad, considering that only 10% of released books get follow-up journal entries. However, I'm sure many of the released books get read and passed around, even if the readers don't record the experience on-line. That, of course, is the point: to share books we love and spread the joy of reading!